THIS week the Daily Express printed in full and across two pages a so-called “organogram” of Government spending.

But the size of each bubble matched the amount of money being spent on it, enabling anyone to quickly work out which bits of Government spending are merely expensive and which prohibitive.

So it is a far more valuable guide to the true state of public spending than all the tables published by the Treasury to accompany George Osborne’s mini budget.

Now as you might expect, the Department of Health was a very big bubble. A £106.66billion bubble to be precise.

Some £97.46billion of that is transferred to the NHS. But that still leaves more than £9billion residing in its Whitehall headquarters, which sounds like an awful lot and merits further investigation.

Then there were the public sector pension bubbles, which have been inflating fast. Some £6.9billion went last year from taxpayers into the NHS pension scheme, with £7.5billion going into the teachers’ pensions scheme and £5.1billion into the “principal civil service pension scheme” (Sir Humphrey says thank you very much, by the way).

Most of us already knew that the welfare system had become a feather bed for the feckless

Something called “police superannuation” took another £1billion, which represented a 37 per cent increase in

a single year.

The debt interest bubble was shockingly large at £48.2billion (a reminder of why Gordon Brown’s name continues to be mud).

But the biggest bubble of all was the Department for Work & Pensions which had inflated to a massive £166.98billion.

Once central administration had taken its surprisingly large skim, some £159billion was passed on for benefits payments.

Now it is in the distribution of spending at the DWP that I have found something so unfair as to cast severe doubt on Mr Osborne’s claims that the Government is on the side of the striving classes.

Where do you imagine the bubble taken up by jobseeker’s allowance – the main benefit for all those unfortunate

people who lost their jobs in the recession – came in the benefit bubble ranking?

Given the economic storm we have been through, it would have to be a biggie, right?

Wrong. Jobseeker’s allowance was only the ninth largest bubble in the DWP budget. Ninth.

Biggest by far was state pensions (£74.22billion) and given that there are many more pensioners these days and they are living longer that is to be expected.

But second biggest was housing benefit (£16.94billion), most of which goes to long-term non-workers.

The third biggest was disability living allowance (£12.57billion), fourth came pension credit/ minimum income guarantee for old folk who never saved a bean (£8.1billion), fifth was income support – another benefit for non-workers – (£6.92billion), sixth was rent rebates (£5.54billion), seventh attendance allowance (£5.34billion) and eighth incapacity benefit – yet another pay-ment for long-term non-workers (£4.94billion).

Trailing in behind that was jobseeker’s allowance (£4.9billion). That’s just three per cent of the benefits bill.

You might well feel content with that, thinking that many of these claimants are layabouts who just don’t want to work.

But in fact there are two kinds of jobseeker’s allowance and it turns out that the sort paid to people who have contributed lots of national insurance is less generous than the sort paid to those who have not.

These fellow citizens of ours, the chief victims of the bust brought about by bankers and politicians, are being drastically short-changed and what is happening to them now could happen to any worker next week, next month or next year.

In return for NI premiums that typically amount to about £50 a week, what do you think they get in their hour of need?

If they are drawing JSA based on having paid sufficient NI and are under 25 they get just £56.25 per week.

Over the age of 25 they get £71. And they can claim the benefit for only six months. What sort of insurance policy pays out to those who need to claim barely more than the premiums they paid in?

But those drawing something called “income based JSA” due to not having paid sufficient NI get the £71 rate from the age of 18 if they are single parents and doubtless qualify for lots of other means-tested benefits too.

Again, what sort of insurance system discriminates in favour of those who never paid premiums in the first place?

Most of us already knew that the welfare system had become a feather bed for the feckless.